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This review of Grundmann, Micklitz and Renner’s New Private Law Theory begins by noting its historical perspective, and the fruitfulness of setting alongside each other seminal writings of European jurists from the early twentieth century with the contributions of American law and economics and critical legal scholars from the late twentieth and early twenty-first. A century ago, legal scholarship was addressing the “social question:” How to accommodate private law to the demands of a rising working class? Today, steepening inequality and polarization have brought the social question, and with it class politics, back into view. Using as a case study the mass sackings engineered by the shipping company P&O in March 2022, we can see that today’s private law is deeply implicated in the generation of structural disadvantage. A private law more concerned with extracting and hiding wealth than creating it might be thought to have a limited future.

The standard model of evolution in the economics of law, its important insights notwithstanding, lacks a good account of inheritance to go with analogues to variation and selection. The normative implication of the standard model, which is that self-organising and spontaneous orders will tend to efficiency, is also misplaced. Just as the association of evolution with progress, characteristic of the theory of legal evolution of a century ago, is now understood to be anachronistic, so it is time to discard outmoded notions linking judge-made law and common law legal reasoning with evolution to efficiency. Setting aside the unwarranted normative connotations of evolutionary models would release them to shape empirical research. Evolutionary theory informs methods, including leximetrics, time-series econometrics and machine learning, with the potential to throw light on the structural dynamics of legal change, and to resolve questions of law’s coevolution with the economy which were raised but not resolved by the legal origins debate.